Larry McMurtry - Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond

Praise for Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

The heck with Walter Benjamins theories; in the end, its storytelling like McMurtrys that will prevail.

Barbara Hoffman, New York Post

McMurtry writes poignantlyoccasionally humorouslyabout his own cloistered childhood, spent largely in fear of shrubbery and poultry, and his surprising distaste for the cowboy life. He is most eloquent when writing about his own passion for reading and books, two entirely different subjects for a man who is not only a prolific writer and reader, but also a rare book dealer and collector.

Ron Franscell, Chicago SunTimes

It is a book not easily forgotten.

Tom Pilkington, The Dallas Morning News

McMurtry is an engaging writer. He tells some savory tales as his memoir proceeds.

Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

How many centuries does it take to get from a pioneer family with all their possessions in a wagon to Proust and Virginia Woolf? in Larry McMurtrys case, about two generations seem to have done the trick.

Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

McMurtry writes as lovingly of reading and books as he writes ambivalently of ranching and cows.

Sue Halpern, The New York Review of Books

McMurtry offers an honest, open account of his life and his family as well as a good chunk of his own growing wisdom. Expect the unexpected from this unusual writer.

David Hendricks, San Antonio ExpressNews

Excellent.

Bill Marvel, The Dallas Morning News

[McMurtrys] dry and gentle humor makes the essays read like his best fiction.

Robert Skimin, Texas Monthly

The always rewarding Larry McMurtry has given us yet another wonderful book.

San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

An elegiac and perceptive memoir.

Adam Woog, The Seattle Times

In this slim, quirky combination of memoir and culture criticism, McMurtry muses on the forces that made him a writer.

Fritz Lanham, Houston Chronicle

A gift.

Mark Pedergrast, The Philadelphia Inquirer

This thoughtful reflection on literatures resonances and echoes is a welcome glimpse into the heart and mind of [Lonesome Doves] creator.

JT, Forbes FYI

BY LARRY MCMURTRY

Paradise

Boones Lick

Roads: Driving Americas Greatest Highways

Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

Duanes Depressed

Crazy Horse

Comanche Moon

Dead Mans Walk

The Late Child

Streets of Laredo

The Evening Star

Buffalo Girls

Some Can Whistle

Anything for Billy

Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

Texasville

Lonesome Dove

The Desert Rose

Cadillac Jack

Somebodys Darling

Terms of Endearment

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Moving On

The Last Picture Show

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

Leaving Cheyenne

Horseman, Pass By

BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA

Pretty Boy Floyd

Zeke and Ned

The McMurtrys first cabin in Archer County

WALTER BENJAMIN
AT THE
DAIRY QUEEN

Reflections at Sixty and Beyond

In November of 1998 I had a real book scouts epiphanyI bought the stock of Barbers Bookstore, and had the pleasure of packing the very shelf where that copy of Rogue Herries once had sat.

Touchstone

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Copyright 1999 by Larry McMurtry

All rights reserved,

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

First Touchstone Edition 2001

Touchstone and colophon are registered trademarks

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Designed by Karolina Harris

Manufactured in the United States of America

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the

Simon & Schuster edition as follows:

McMurtry, Larry.

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:

reflections at sixty and beyond / Larry McMurtry

p. cm.

1. McMurtry, Larry. 2. McMurtry, LarryBooks and reading. 3. McMurtry,

LarryHomes and hauntsTexas. 4. Novelists, American20th centuryBiography. 5. Antiquarian booksellersUnited StatesBiography.

6. Books and readingTexas. 7. TexasBiography. I. Title.

PS3563.A319Z475 1999 99-19346 CIP

813.54dc21

[b]

ISBN 0-684-85496-1
eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2759-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-6848-7019-9

0-684-87019-3 (Pbk)

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases,

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For James, Elena, Curtis

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Modern man no longer works at that which cannot be abbreviated.

PAUL VALRY

IN THE summer of 1980, in the Archer City Dairy Queen, while nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the roadOlneys, eighteen miles southbut easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a Dr Pepper), I opened a book called Illuminations and read Walter Benjamins essay The Storyteller, nominally a study of or reflection on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel, after several rereadings) an examination, and a profound one, of the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentiethcentury lives.

The place where I first read the essay, Archer Citys Dairy Queen, was apposite in more ways than one. Dairy Queens, simple drive-up eateries, taverns without alcohol, began to appear in the arid little towns of west Texas about the same time (the late sixties) that Walter Benjamins work began to arrive in the English languagein the case of Illuminations, beautifully introduced by Hannah Arendt. The aridity of the small west Texas towns was not all a matter of unforgiving skies, baking heat, and rainlessness, either; the drought in those towns was social, as well as climatic. The extent to which it was moral is a question we can table for the moment. What I remember clearly is that before the Dairy Queens appeared the people of the small towns had no place to meet and talk; and so they didnt meet